The game I played most this week: Atomic Dreams

Collecting: Atomic Dreams

Atomic Dreams is a new platform scroller from B3Team that focuses on the very basics: running, jumping, and collecting stuff. You won’t find much shooting or hitting triggers, levels, and so forth: the game is purely about collecting items at each level so that you can make it to the next. It’s pretty straightforward. AD has graphics that are decent, but not exceptional. Level design is also pretty good and shows some creativity, but not it’s tremendously different that what we’ve seen before. The animation is very good and keeps the levels looking interesting without being gimmicky or overly busy. One thing the game has in its favor is that there is a good deal of variety between each level in terms of looks and the enemies you’ll face. Another worthwhile feature is that the game will automatically restart at whatever you last played, and you can set the game to start at any previous level you’ve completed. 

I’d have more to say about the game if it did more to stand out or if the category wasn’t already so crowded. I wouldn’t say that the game is weak, but I have to say that AD has some blandness to it. There’s no real back-story as such. And the game’s basic formula of run-jump and nothing else limits how interactive the levels can be.  (I’m thinking of Curse of the Pharaohs, which allowed you to do all sorts of things besides run and jump.)

Mission-Based Flight: Sky Racer

Here we have yet another noble attempt to produce a flight simulator on the Pocket PC. I remember the good old days of the early 80s, when the idea of just being able to fly was a pretty neat concept. But these days, the game-buying public has all but gotten over the whole flight sim category. You just don’t see too many these days, and most of the ones that occasionally pop out of the hangar just aren’t that good. Most of the games that involve flight at all are really arcade games at heart (i.e., ported over from consoles). The one exception is Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, which, while a very sophisticated product, was never that exciting.

To its credit, Sky Racer is hands-down the most sophisticated flight sim I’ve yet seen on the Pocket PC. While mission-based, the game allows you to adjust factors like the time of day, cloudiness, wind, and weather conditions. You also get several planes from which to choose, all of which look modeled pretty closely after the original aircraft. The games offers a chase plane view by default (flight data like airspeed, vertical speed, and height are presented at the top left of the screen), and there’s even a decent-looking internal cockpit mode that, while it has some obvious limitations, does resemble a cockpit.

The game also has autopilot and instructor modes (which you can toggle at any time), and there’s even a full-screen overhead map mode telling you where you are in relation to your current mission objectives. (If you get lost, you can always check the transparent compass display at the top and center of the screen; your current objective will be highlighted by a red waypoint marker. The distance indicator on the right side of the screen tells you how far away you are from your next target.)

Another interesting feature of the game is that the graphics are very tweak able, almost as much as in a desktop PC game. You can change settings such as lighting, texture quality, and even resolution in order to get the optimum balance between visual quality and speed. 

Sadly, despite all the effort that went into the game’s features, the overall experience of the game just doesn’t work out too well. While the graphics settings provide a nice way of customizing the game across a variety of devices, it still ends up being pretty slow. The frame rate is also inconsistent. On the first mission, where your job is to fly through levitating rings in the air, the frame rate drags when the rings are in view, but when you fly up or down or left and right, the speed kicks up considerably once the rings are out of view (since they no longer have to be rendered). This is very distracting and really hurts the illusion of flight. And the flight model itself is a little goofy.

Although the game’s physics focus more on the arcade side of things (as it should be considering the limitations of the platform), they just don’t feel right. Whenever you bank left or right, the plane tends to swing back and forth on its axis in a way that I’m pretty sure doesn’t happen in a real airplane. The plane exhibits the same behavior whenever diving or climbing. This is distracting and make the game a little hard to control.  

Frame rate issues aside, the game’s graphics are reasonably good considering the lack of 3D rendering and limited processing power. The biggest graphics blunder the game commits is the sky texture, which is way too small and ends abruptly.   Imagine someone pasting a picture of the sky on a light blue wall, and you get the idea. There’s nothing quite like doing a turn or a climb just to have the sky disappear scroll off into nothing.  It just looks bad.

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.